Miami, FL — Crypto would not want regulation – one thing that charting the value of bitcoin over successive U.S. governments clearly exhibits, in accordance with the provocative co-founder of BitMEX and CIO of Maelstrom, Arthur Hayes.
Hayes’ thesis is easy: fiat liquidity – exactly, the printing of extra models of fiat cash – is the one factor that impacts bitcoin’s value proposition.
“I believe that if you want to talk about what is the price of Bitcoin and what’s the fair value, or what’s the future price, all that matters is how many units of fiat are there today,” Hayes instructed the viewers at Consensus Miami 2026. “How many units of fiat will there be in the future, and what’s the pace of this fiat creation?”
While there’s plenty of speak about tradfi and regulators and crypto coming collectively and having this “bastard child,” the bulk of people that attend conferences like Consensus need solely to see the quantity go up, Hayes mentioned. But they overlook the value of Bitcoin has gone from zero to nonetheless many trillions of {dollars} that it is price as we speak, he added, hammering his thesis dwelling:
”The extra money that is printed within the U.S. and world wide, the extra value that bitcoin can have in fiat currencies,” said Hayes. “And it is this liquidity a part of the equation that basically drives the value of bitcoin, and never something to do with politics.”
Few executives in crypto keep a social presence as full of life, chaotic and surprisingly insightful as Hayes’. Behind the lapel-grabbing theatrics lies a observe report that merchants pay. For occasion, Hayes was early to the rise of a number of AI-adjacent tokens, a sector that dominated speculative flows all through 2024 and 2025. He additionally championed Zcash (ZEC), which rallied greater than 450% over the previous 12 months.
Looking again over the previous few U.S. administrations, key components could be picked out that tremendously bolstered the value of bitcoin, Hayes mentioned. These included bailing out banks through the banking disaster and printing much more cash, which despatched bitcoin “off to the races.”
More just lately, occasions like COVID, stimulus checks, Biden’s New Green Deal, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have pushed up the value of bearer belongings like bitcoin and gold.
“This is the value that bitcoin provides outside of the regulatory apparatus,” Hayes mentioned. “It’s precisely the reason that it does not adhere to the regulatory regime that some of you wish to put it under with bills like the clarity Act and other and other things.”
